Open access

One of the latest leading trends in science in the 21st century aimed at disseminating knowledge. It is associated with the increase in openness and sharing broadly understood science (including the created scientific publications, research results) not only with the scientific community, but also with the entire society that supports this science. The trend is based on the cOAlition S – a coalition of research funding agencies and organizations established in 2018. Following this initiative, the so-called PLAN S, was created and came into force at the beginning of 2021. Plan S is based on 10 principles. First and the most important principle of implementing the plan is that the authors or their institutions retain the proprietary copyright to their publications, while disseminating the results of their scientific activities. This is possible thanks to the Creative Commons license with attribution.

The signatories of Plan S agreed on the implementation of the Open Access Strategy with major publishers of subscription and hybrid journals, where most of the research articles created as part of the coalition-funded research are published. They encouraged publishers to modify existing agreements so that all authors could release their final authorship of articles under a free license and at the time of publication (Open Access mode).

Plan S runs alongside Horizon 2020, the largest EU research and innovation program to date. It involves transferring ideas, achievements and discoveries from laboratories to the market. Horizon 2020 has the political support of European leaders and members of the European Parliament. They acknowledged that investments in research and innovation are essential for Europe’s future and put them at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart and sustainable growth. Horizon 2020 fits in with these efforts by combining research and innovation with an emphasis on three key areas: excellent science, leading position in industry and social challenges. The aim is to ensure that world-class science and technology are created in Europe to stimulate economic growth.

More information about Open Science can be found at:

• Book: Open Access by Peter Suber, the leader of the Open Access movement.The book introduces the reader to the most important issues with Open Access to scientific works. It is a compendium designed for the scientific community.

Collecting Open Science
Services registering open journals, books and repositories:

• Direct of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) – a catalogue of scientific journals available in the open model and implementing good publishing practices. The main goal of the catalogue is to increase the visibility and accessibility of open journals. To the catalogue may join journals meeting certain criteria, including providing content immediately after publication and in accordance with the provisions of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
• Direct of Open Books – data logging service on open access monographs aimed at promoting and increasing the visibility of academic books. The database’s resources also include metadata that can be searched and viewed. The service is run by the DOAB Foundation – a Dutch non-profit organization established by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition.
• The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OPENDOAR) – a website that collects information about open repositories. The database can be viewed or searched according to geographical criteria.

Collecting Open Science at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Science
As part of the Open Science Policy at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of Polish Academy of Science, we implement:

• RCIN – We have joined the project of building our own Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes in which we collect our own collections of doctoral dissertations. At the moment, our catalogue contains about 270 doctoral dissertations (accessed on 11.02.2021) and is constantly updates.
• Open Access – It is a free, universal access to the current knowledge. This is a cOAlition S agreement with publishers of leading scientific journals. The program implements the provision of sharing and disseminating scientific publications and the results of research funded from public funds for use by researchers, students, entrepreneurs, and the society as a whole. In practice, Open Access (OA) is implemented under the so-called green path (sharing articles in free repositories or other databases) or through the so-called golden path (publishing articles in open journals, which usually involves the author covering editorial costs).

Our Institute participates in national and consortium agreements with the possibility of publishing in the OA mode. We joined consortia in Springer, Elsevier and the American Chemical Society. In national agreements, the costs of publishing articles under the program are covered from the national license fee from funds from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Since 2019, Springer national license, so-called Compact, operates in Poland. In the Compact license, the major part of the license fee financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education is allocated to open publication of a certain number of articles per year. Under the national license of Elsevier 2019-2021 operates a pilot program of open publishing dedicated to Polish correspondent authors. The program has two parts: A and B. Under Program A it is possible to publish a certain number of open publications that will be fully financed by the national license fee: 1500 articles in 2021. If the pool of articles for a given year in Program A runs out before the end of the year, Program B will be launched for the remainder of the year. In 2021, you can publish, first in Program A, and then in Program B, in all 1777 hybrid magazines and Gold Open Access provided by Elsevier.

Under ACS’s agreement with OA, it is possible to publish under a CC-BY license a certain number of articles approved for publication in the current year at no charge to authors (note: the date “Manuscript Acceptance Date” sometimes referred to in articles as “Revised” is decisive). The program includes publishing to the ACS Web Edition collection. A pool of 324 articles is available in 2021. The pool is not divided into institutions and articles are included in the program in the order of admission to publication.

Note!

In the NCN’s open access policy, as part of financing published publications, there are 3 accepted licenses: CC-BY 4.0; CC-BY-SA 4.0. for articles under transformation agreements, CC-BY-ND 4.0 in specific cases agreed with NCN. More information can be found on the official website: https://creativecommons.pl/

Research data
Data obtained in the research process and used in scientific work, to which anyone interested has free access without significant legal and technical restrictions. They are made available widely via the Internet in such a way that they can be reused, modified, and made available in compliance with the law. In general – research data includes everything that was produced in the course of the research:

• numerical data,
• text documents, notes,
• questionnaires, surveys, survey results, queries,
• audio and video recordings, photographs,
• databases content (video, audio, texts, images),
• software (input files, scripts), computer simulations results
• mathematical models, algorithms
• laboratory protocols, methodological descriptions
• samples, artifacts, objects and more

Sharing data allows other scientists to repeat or verify research, or prove that the data is true. Open data is collected and shared in repositories. However, not all datasets may be open, in particular, it concerns personal data, commercialization of research results and national security. Information about the existence of data should always be publicly available to avoid duplication of research. Data should be made available in accordance with FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. These principles were designed to respect the right to reuse research material under clearly defined conditions, with respect to the law, by both people and machines. These are not strict rules, but rather guidelines for working properly with your data. The FAIR principles were created and are further developed primarily to make data accessible to both users and computer software that searches databases without human intervention.

More information and publications on FAIR can be found on the GO FAIR website.

The tool for quickly assessing whether data meets the FAIR rules is available at this link: www.ands-nectar-rds.org.au/fair-tool.

Science Europe has prepared a guide in English, which provides a template for a data management plan: https://www.scienceeurope.org/media/jezkhnoo/se_rdm_practical_guide_final.pdf

Data Management Plan
The Data Management Plan is a document describing activities performed at each stage of work with research data. DMP should be created both at the initial stage of scientific research and after its completion. It is increasingly required by funding institutions and agencies (National Science Centre, European Commission, Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environmental Research Council). In the agreement for EU funding under Horizon 2020 and the competitions of the National Science Centre, the obligation regarding data management plans was approved. It is recommended that data should be stored in open repositories and applicants are required to submit a data management plan at the time of joining the project.

The data management plan should include information on:

• Identification of data – what data will be produced or collected (for example the kinds, formats, and volumes)
• Data management – how the data will be stored and described (methodology, standards, metadata)
• Ethical and legal issues – intellectual property rights, copyright, classified data, sensitive data
• Data protection and backup
• Selection of data for long-term storing – which data will be stored in the long term
• Sharing and preparing for long-term storing – how the data will be made available (how, when, to whom, using what license)

DMP Benefits:

• Good planning and management of the collected data increases the quality and reliability of the research itself;
• All data can be easily located, the plan also facilitates the simultaneous work of many people on the same project;
• Efficient data management, prevents unnecessary duplication or overwriting;
• Improving data security;
• Easier preparation of data for later sharing

Useful websites:

• DMP Tool – an on-line tool for creating data management plans; provides examples of such plans.
• DMP online – creator of research data management plans. The service also provides a range of guidelines and DMP templates required by various research funding institutions (e.g. the European Commission under Horizon 2020).